For more and more Canadians, love and marriage no longer go together like a horse and carriage.
There are more divorces, more singles, more single-parent families and more separations than ever before, according to a Statistics Canada analysis published last week.
And the number of common-law relationships has reached historic highs.
Based on the 1996 census, fewer than three in four Canadian families involve a married couple. Almost 12 percent of families involve common-law relationships and 14.5 percent are single-parent families.
As recently as a decade ago, the proportion of Canadian couples who were married was more than 80 percent.
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“Marriage appears to be a fragile bond for more and more individuals,” said the Statistics Canada report. “One result was the continuation of the upward trend over the last 25 years in the number of lone-parent families.”
In 1996, just under one million Canadian families (13 percent) were headed by a single parent, usually a woman.
The decline of marriage also was reflected in the number of divorced Canadians, many of them now living alone. Close to 2.6 million Canadians, 12 percent of those 15 years or older, were living alone last year.
Meanwhile, the number of divorced Canadians increased 28 percent over five years to 1.6 million. In 1971, 1.3 percent of the population was divorced. A quarter century later, the proportion was up to 7.2 percent and rising.
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The data also show that common-law relationships are no longer merely a form of trial marriage for young people. “While common-law unions had traditionally been more prevalent among people in their early twenties, they have become more popular among older individuals as well.”
Still, for all the evidence of the growth of non-traditional family units, the census returns indicated most Canadian children still live in two parent families with married parents.
There were 9.4 million children in Canada last year.
“In 1991, almost 78 children out of 100 lived in families of married couples,” said the government report on changing families. “Five years later, this portion had dropped to about 73 out of every 100 while the proportion of children living in common-law families and in lone-parent families increased.”
Across Canada, 14 percent of children under six lived with common-law parents last year. In Quebec, it was 31 percent.
